There are a couple particularly dangerous myths, perpetuated by the sugar industry, that need to be dispelled about nutrition and dieting. The idea that both low-fat and low-sugar diets are effective approaches to a healthy diet is bogus. Low-fat diets will often hurt your overall nutrition profile. Excessive sugar is culprit number one. Meanwhile, unsaturated fats are actually good for you in reasonable quantities. Moreover, low-fat foods frequently replace the fat with sugar, making for far less nutritious food. At the same time, true health nuts can make themselves nutty with trying to seek out and follow all the information that’s out there. (By the way, beware of eating too many Brazil nuts, lest you get too much selenium.) It’s great to talk to a doctor about your personal health factors and what areas of your diet and nutrition need the most work.

Generally speaking, however, identifying and following a few basic principles that can improve your diet is a much more effective approach than trying to research and maintain a perfect diet. There is no such thing. The paleo diet is the latest fad. The Mediterranean diet is known as something of a gold standard and a great place to start if you’re looking to build a healthy diet from the ground up.

Cooking and eating food is a much more complex and nuanced behavior than we commonly realize. It’s typically couched in generational habits, recipes, and social connections, but it can also be reduced the biological imperative and physiological mechanisms of substance. In other words, in one sense, maintaining healthy diet and nutrition is as simple as making a list of all the food and beverage you should consume from one day to the next and then eating them. In another sense, there are typically powerful forces at play, both cultural and individual, that make sticking to this diet difficult at most. Take the economics of eating healthy. Yes, in theory, you can eat healthy without immediately going broke, but what if you just can’t stand eating beans? It’s going to be tough.